Tuesday, 19 December 2017

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad, James Dickey, Deliverance, Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan 1897-1945, Fiona Mozley, Elmet, Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays, Richard Huscroft, Tales from the Long Twelfth Century: The Rise and Fall of the Angevin Empire, Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Reread Foot's Bevan for the first time in 20 years, I think, and was surprised by how unsympathetic a character he was, despite Foot's hero-worship. It must be me that has changed, but he no longer comes across as a brave, principled crusader, but as an egotistical, destructive polemicist. I loved 'A Gentleman in Moscow, which centres around a Russian aristocrat caught up in the aftermath of the revolution and trying to make the best of things while under house arrest in a fading grand hotel for 40 years. A lovely, sweet story of a true gentleman coming to terms with a world profoundly different to that he was born into and had taken for granted. Was dreading a sad ending as he gets dragged away to a gulag, but the author contrived a beautiful, believable way for the Count to end up happy ever after

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